This past weekend I was lucky enough to compete with Sean and Travis in Cochon 555. It is a cooking competition with 5 chefs 5 winemakers, and 5 pigs. There are 10 different locations throughout the country with the winners competing in Aspen at the Food and Wine Classic (check out the website http://www.cochon555.com). I’ll start off by saying it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. They give you a whole pig and one week to prepare as many dishes as you would like to present at the competition. Needless to say we did not get a lot of sleep during the week preparing the 13 dishes that chef decided to do. However, it was well worth all of the effort because we won! I had such a great time and it was an honor to work next to chefs like Sean and Travis in a competition. I would love to put up a lot of pictures but I was a little busy during the event so I didn’t get a chance to take that many photos and the ones I do have will be posted at a later date once I get some rest. I dont really know when that will be since we are now starting to prepare for Aspen which will be a challenge to say the least. Were all very excited and can’t wait to do it again.

Beautiful tomatoes like these get me very pumped up. It lets me know spring time is here. Along with spring comes one of my favorite things about cooking at places like McCradys, we get the biggest variety of veggies I’ve ever seen. All are grown locally and most of them on our farm (just look at Chef Brock’s arm). I’ll be posting a lot more this spring to make sure everyone gets to see all of the wonderful veggies.

This was the view from the hotel I got to stay at with chef Brock when we went to Star Chefs last year. It was an amazing time and one that I’ll never forget. I’ll continue going to Star Chefs every year as long as they have it, the information I learned there was incredible.